The Data Vault — Black Foot Logistics

What's in the recent issue

Everything referenced in our content for the week of August 3, 2026.

XLSX

April–May 2026 import shift analysis

EIA company-level import records, both months, compared by origin country, product and PADD. 2,993 line items across 151 and 157 importing companies. Includes our computed deltas.

PDF

Source log — every figure mapped

Each statistic we published, matched to its originating file, table and page. This is our audit trail. If a number of ours is wrong, this is how you'd catch it.

XLSX

Regional distillate position, all five PADDs

Distillate stocks by PADD and sub-region, week ending 7/24/26, with year-ago and two-year comparisons. The data behind the fuel index tool.

PDF

Houston gateway profile

Export trade lanes 2021–2025, June 2026 comparative statistics, and the physical constraint picture — channel depth, crane count, on-dock rail — drawn from the BTS 2026 port report.

On what we don't include. There are no forecasts in here, no proprietary indices, and no numbers that can't be sourced. If our analysis produced a finding, we will show the inputs so you can reproduce it. We do not fill in gaps here, nor do we estimate.

How we ran the current analysis

The April–May import finding, start to finish.

Line by Line

EIA publishes company-level import records monthly — every importer, product, port of entry, PADD, origin country and volume. Summary tables aggregate these into broad regions, which is where the signal gets lost.

The Sum and the Difference by origin

Totalled volume by origin country for each month, then compared. Repeated by product and by PADD of entry. No modeling. Roughly twenty lines of code.

Identifying the Top line

Total imports moved less than 1% — 239.4M to 237.4M barrels. Persian Gulf imports fell 59%, Saudi Arabia alone 68%, while Ecuador, Nigeria and Brazil rose 141%, 143% and 125% respectively.

Validated against an independent source

Checked direction against the BTS 2026 Port Performance report, which shows Persian Gulf imports already running 10% below 2024 in the first half of 2025. Our one-month finding sits on an established trend rather than contradicting it.

Assess, Analyze, Assert

We did not claim to know why the shift happened, whether it continues, or what it does to rates. In exchange for a more dramatic and less defensible first issue, we chose to be observant. Flat, verifiable analysis is more useful to our readers.

Abridged Source Log

Full version is in the download. Here's the cliff notes.

Claim	Source	Location
ULSD Gulf Coast $2.111 Jan 2026 → $4.225 on 7/24/26	EIA Weekly Petroleum Status Report	Table 12
Commercial crude stocks 404.5M bbl, −5.2% YoY	EIA Weekly Petroleum Status Report	Table 1
Refinery crude input 17,336 kb/d, +425 YoY	EIA Weekly Petroleum Status Report	Table 1, line 17
Distillate PADD 1 22.1M bbl, −16.4% YoY	EIA Weekly Petroleum Status Report	Table 6
PADD 3 45.7M bbl, −1.0%; PADD 2 28.2M, +8.7%	EIA Weekly Petroleum Status Report	Table 6
Distillate production 5,338 kb/d, +3.2% YoY	EIA Refiner & Blender Net Production	Table 3
Houston empty export TEUs 64,058 vs 36,625 (+75%)	Port Houston Comparative Statistics, Jun 2026	TEU table
Europe/Med 26.4% #1 export lane; Far Asia 23.7%	Port Houston / JOC-PIERS, Mar 2026	Export table
Houston 27 SPP cranes; 46 ft channel; 1 on-dock rail terminal	BTS Port Performance Freight Statistics 2026	Tables 2–3, Fig. 5
Hormuz = 8% of U.S. crude imports, $8.5B, 17.7M tons	BTS Port Performance Freight Statistics 2026	§4.1
All April/May origin-shift figures	EIA Company Level Imports, Apr & May 2026	Computed from line items

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PLEASE NOTE: Our Houston post references the 2025 ocean carrier alliance restructuring. This is the only figure in this release not drawn from a government dataset. It’s sourced to public industry reporting rather than a primary statistical release, and we want to flag it as such. The EIA and BTS numbers may not carry the same weight in your own analysis. Worth considering.